Mobile Marketing Musings with Vinícius Gerez

My name is Vinícius. I started my career as a user acquisition manager at Wooga about five years ago. Over the years I have learned and grown a lot. I started advertising our games on desktop and have since transitioned to mobile marketing.

We start marketing our games early during the soft launch period, i.e., before they have proven their quality to go live worldwide. We accumulate learnings about our target audience and how to best reach game players. With these learnings we move on to define the strategy for global launch and how to optimize our marketing. After launching our games globally, we keep iterating on our ads throughout the full lifecycle in order to keep attracting new players.

ON METRICS:

Before looking at the numbers and trying to draw conclusions, it is extremely important to define key metrics. Only when you know what you are looking for can you consciously pursue it. Aiming for as many players as possible to download your game is just one dimension.

In order for campaigns to be deemed successful, you also have to look at the cost for acquiring users. More importantly, you should focus on retention behaviour and how much of your investment they bring back to you.

The longer a player remains in your app, the more positive effects they bring through investing in the app as well as becoming an ambassador for it. If I had to name my two top metrics, I would go with return on ad spend (ROAS) and predicted LTV (Analytics and BI teams for the win!).

ON CREATIVES:

Creatives are absolutely important. They are what catches the attention of future customers and guides them through the journey of an app. A key element for creatives is testing. If you have an idea of what attracts people to your app, it’s a start, but you have to be open to being proven wrong. For example, sometimes users are attracted by specific aspects of the game that don’t necessarily get them to spend money at a later point in time.

On top of that our games contain various modes, for example solving puzzles as well as decorating a certain space. Dissecting those different aspects and testing them alone and in combination until you find the best performing grouping is crucial. Taking a step back from what you think players find appealing and really testing various creatives has helped us a lot when optimizing our marketing campaigns.

ON OPPORTUNITIES:

Again, testing is key! Always be open to try out new things and test them smartly. Be on the lookout for new ad formats. At the moment playable ads are THE thing. Also, look for various networks that might bring interesting new approaches to user acquisition and engagement or new emerging markets and trends in creatives. Lastly, don’t isolate yourself from the outside world; always check on what others are doing and learn from them.

THE LAST WORD:

Working closely together with other teams in your company is very important. Make sure the different teams are on the same page and share one goal in order to create the best possible user experience. You’ll see it in the results. This also means aligning large campaigns, for e.g. special holidays or occasions with the app store or play store page of your app.

Treating your analytics team nicely always pays off as they can tell you where value is really coming from in order to optimize campaigns for maximum performance.